Haunting
by Renn Ireigh
Summary: Growing up Gravekeeper: a retrospective. Karin, Sabrina, Morty, and Will did not exactly have ideal childhoods. It's lingered. Set in my fic-verse which started with "Patchouli." Updated to completion: The Incident that haunts Will and Morty; epilogue.
1. Invitation

_Disclaimer: _Pokemon is the property of Tajiri Satoshi and Sugimori Ken, who probably didn't intend for people like me to do things like this with their brain child.

_Notes: _Loosely inspired by the song "Walking With A Ghost" by Tegan and Sara, which you can't see at this point, but seven years ago, it used to be there…

_Timeline: _"Haunting" is in large sense the prequel to my "Patchouli" fic-verse. That said, if you're familiar with my work, suggested reading order is after "Fuse." In the continuity of the fic-verse, this piece starts out and finishes between "Lucky" and "Kindling," with some timeline jogging as noted.

_Rating:_ "Haunting" is rated T for language, inclusion of the type of relationships that tend to merit a Thou Shalt Not and by which I don't mean same-sex ones, and content in general.

**Haunting**

Renn Ireigh

Chapter One: Invitation

"I'd like to make a formal request," Karin said, hand well up. Not that she'd needed to do so to attract attention. Her sheer force of personality made her hard to miss, especially in the small common room, even if she _were_ sprawled on the floor atop nothing more than a (velvet-covered) beanbag chair.

"As opposed to an informal one?" Lance drawled, stretching his hands back behind his head. _He_, at least, had taken pride of place in a wide, deep armchair which had been greatly enhanced with the addition of several large pillows. "And when has anyone ever stopped you from talking?"

"Oh, shut up," she said, but not without affection. "No, this is a serious thing. Look, no one ever comes to the party anyway. I don't know why we bother all of this making Clair track down each leader and each person on the invitation list to make sure no one has some pressing obligation that would cause them to miss the party when they cut out anyway. First of all I'm still not sure why we care if people don't come, but more to the point, it's a waste of her time. The Global Conference is here this year anyway. Why don't we just tack the party onto the end of the Conference? People are going to be here anyway, so we just make the party bigger, invite everybody from Houen and Shinou and whatnot, very strongly suggest the Indigo League stick around up here, and basically make it an enormous shindig?"

"Well, you mean, aside from the fact that we're all going to be sick of having the Houen and Shinou people up here in the first place?" Lorelei asked wryly. "That's not a serious objection… at least I don't think so. I think it's a good idea."

"I think it's a terrible idea," Morty said. "Not because you were the one to suggest it, although that too, but because like Lorelei said, we're already going to have these people up here for a week, and if we liked them, we'd invite them up more than once a year."

"Fortunately, you don't actually have a voice in this," Karin said sweetly. "Because, dearest darlingest baby brother-kins, you got invited to this meeting out of courtesy since your rump was up here anyway, _not_ because your opinion counts."

_((This might not be the time or place)) _Will suggested, although he didn't expect himself to be taken seriously.

"Anyone else have a serious objection to just taking the party onto the end of the Conference, gritting our teeth, and having Indigo crammed with people a few extra days?"

"Saves me time chasing people down, I'm all for it," Clair said. As a Leader, she would have been like Morty in the role of observer for this meeting of the Elite; but unlike him, she stood Elite Reserve, and as such she _did_ have a voice.

"Do we think people will actually stick around for it?" Bruno asked. "I mean, seems to me, if you're not going to come to the party, you're not going to come to the party, you just end up scooting out a day early instead of leaving on time."

Karin shrugged. "Two words. Free alcohol."

"That works for _you_, not necessarily the rest of the world."

"I think it's a good enough suggestion," Lance said. "If people don't come they don't come. Let's just do it that way."

"One more suggestion," Karin and Morty said at the same time. They looked at each other and grinned, though there wasn't much humor in either; Will rolled his eyes. Morty made an expansive "Oh no, after you" gesture.

"Don't invite my mother," Karin said.

"You know I have to do that."

"She always comes, and she always ends up screaming bloody murder at one or the other of us. I don't care that she's a former Elite, seems to me that the fact she can't control herself in public is a good enough objection."

_((Especially if we are going to have the representatives from the Houen and Shinou leagues here as well)) _Will pointed out. _((It would be embarrassing to have to escort her out in front of them, but more embarrassing if she were to stay and do it anyway))_

"And no one ever eggs her on. She _always_ starts it. Face it, Lance, it's a scene every year."

Lance rubbed his temples. "You know I agree with you that she's a train wreck on two legs-"

"Good, then it's settled?"

"I wasn't finished. I can't not invite her. She's a former Elite but more to the point, she's the head of the Gravekeeper Clan. That's a hell of an insult, to leave her off the list."

"Invite the Clan scion in her stead," Morty suggested.

"You're already invited, Morty, and she'd still come up here screaming. Besides which, if she thinks it's coming from me, she's going to think that the Dragon Clan is snubbing her, which means she'll be coming up fit to be tied to yell at one of you, plus she'll probably start a Clan war in the middle of the party."

"There hasn't been a Clan war in two hundred _years_, Lance," Karin said.

"And that's all the more reason to _not start one now._ I don't know what _your_ Clan leader is like, but I know what _Draco_ will do if-"

"So have Lorelei sign the invites," Morty interrupted.

"Hell, I'll sign them," Karin snapped. "I can make it in very clear language that-"

"It doesn't matter who signs them if the point is that she's not getting one!" Lance said. "She's _still_ going to think it comes from me, which means she is _still_ going to think it comes from Dragon, which means she will _still_ come up here to pick a fight with me, with Uncle Draco, and with you, possibly but not absolutely in that order, and if we really lock her out through shields and security, she'll just pick another time and place."

"Dammit," Morty said. "What do we have to do to convince you?"

"I don't think it's going to work," Lorelei attempted, but Morty's glare cut her off.

"Beyond being a twisted waste of carbon, she's also insane. Do we _want_ her representing Indigo in public?"

"Whom can we invite from Gravekeeper that could be trusted to keep her sort of under wraps?" Lance asked. "Anyone?"

_((There is not a soul in the Clan- pun intended- who could stand up to her that is not in this room, except our sister, who is likely to attempt to incinerate her, and that will not end any better)) _Will said grimly. _((I am not sure how things work in Dragon, but one does not oppose the Clan Matriarch if one wants to live. That is not an exaggeration))_

Lance sighed and ran a hand through his hair, making it stick up even more than usual. "Look, it's not that I like this any more than you do—"

"Trust me, you do," Karin interrupted.

"—but it's two kinds of hell if she's invited, and four if she isn't."

"Right," Karin said, standing up. "I'm going to see if I remember the name of the guy I met in a bar in Goldenrod last year who told me he was an assassin by trade. I think he was kidding, but it's possible he wasn't."

"I'm pretty sure that even though killing your mother would be ethically justified, it would still be illegal," Lance said.

"Who said I was taking a contract out on her? I'm taking it out on you. If I want my mother's head on a platter I'm doing it myself," Karin snapped, slamming the door.

Morty and Will got to their feet. _((I think we'd better…))_

"She's kidding," Morty said as Clair slipped out the door behind them. "I'm pretty sure. But I think we'd ought to…"

"Yeah," Lance said. "Yeah. I think you'd ought to too."


	2. Scythe Moon

_Disclaimer: _It's for the good of this kids' series that I don't own the rights.

_Notes: _I should probably add a warning specific to this chapter. I'm not going to do that. Observe the rating. And hug your children, if you have them.

**Haunting**

Renn Ireigh

Chapter Two: Scythe Moon

Clair found her- well, girlfriend wasn't the right word for it, not yet- in the usual place, which was to say the highest point of Indigo Plateau's Hall, the roof of the building. She shut the trap door- carefully, as the shingles were slick with rain- and let her eyes adjust to the darkness, cut though it was by the stars and the sliver of moon.

Karin was on the other side, which wasn't unusual; she'd climbed out of the window of her bedroom and was sitting in the sill. Clair would have joined her by that entrance if she hadn't suspected that after leaving the common room in which they'd all met, Karin had sprinted headlong down the corridor and up the stairs and locked and bolted her door. She figured that Morty and Will would try that path, which was all the more reason Clair had taken the alternate route.

"The stars are beautiful tonight," Karin said without looking as soon as she heard the cautious footsteps.

"And the moon," Clair agreed, sitting next to the younger woman.

"It's not," Karin said, and Clair startled- she hadn't been expecting that, at least not in that cool, flat tone. If anything she'd been expecting a snap. "We call this a scythe moon. Look at the shape." She pointed, and the crescent did look like a blade. "It means nothing good is coming."

"In whose lore?"

"Gravekeeper." This time she did snap, but only slightly; then that same eerie calm returned. "The night I was born, this moon was in the sky. And I came out with the shape on my forehead in blood. No surprise my mother handed me off to the nearest nursemaid. If you believe in all those signs and portents and all that crap, which she does, you'd know that I was one kid she wasn't going to manage to turn."

"What do you mean by that?"

"Well, let's put it this way," she said with a little smile- the kind that wasn't friendly, or happy, or humorous. "Clan name of Gravekeeper. You're the latest in an unbroken line of ghosts- and you look around, and all your family is managing to produce is psychics. You know some pretty strong psychics, but you also know that they can't keep ghosts quiet for long, because fact one, ghosts hate psychics, and fact two, the ghosts in the Tower hate _very strongly, _ergo fact three, ghosts like to kill psychics, drink their energy, and then kill more of them. So it becomes a matter of Clan importance that you get some little ghosties into the blood, and fast. You get yourself over to the strongest ghost you can find and you slaughter something important on the nights you intend to conceive, you do all your rituals so your kids are born on a solstice or an equinox, and after a couple years, you get four kids. Your first one's born under Absol, and no mistake- his scythe is on her forehead. She's marked. Your second one's psi. Your third one's psi. Your fourth one's psi. You hit menopause. You're totally fucked. What do _you_ try to do?"

Clair said nothing.

"Right, well, you are a reasonable human being, and if you ever had kids, you'd probably love them even if they were blithering idiots." She fell silent, staring at the moon.

"You said three psychics."

"Yeah. That's how it started."

"So Morty is…"

"Well, he isn't dead," she said. "Although he's going to be, if he doesn't finally quit it with the heroin. But he didn't start out with ghosts." Karin stretched and said, very firmly, "That scythe moon is the same kind of beautiful as the icicle that falls on your head and kills you."

She and Clair sat in silence in the rooftop cold, the bedroom light at their backs, looking at the stars and the moon.

"You've never talked about it," Clair said suddenly.

"About what?"

"What it was like growing up in there."

"Hell," Karin said shortly. "Pure hell. No way she was winning mother of the year, that's for sure."

"What happened?"

"I was born. She regretted it. She tried her best to rectify that mistake. The end."

"By which you mean she tried to kill you?"

Karin snorted. "No. You don't kill a daughter of Absol. That would mean that the scythe cuts for _you_."

"So what…" Karin's jaw clenched, and Clair hurried, "Look, if I'm prying- what are you doing?"

Their relationship, if you wanted to call it that (and oh, Clair did) hadn't yet progressed beyond a few upright make-out sessions in corners of Indigo. Clair tried not to stare too obviously as Karin pulled off her shirt, not to stare at the creamy curves cupped in cotton, at the stretch of skin turned lush in the moonlight-

-and then stared blatantly, unable to help herself, at the scars.

"Have you ever wondered how ghost attacks work?" Karin said conversationally. "How it is that something or someone technically dead can manipulate enough energy to physically harm another creature?"

It became obvious that the question wasn't rhetorical. "I suppose I thought it was similar to psychic energy," Clair said. "Manipulated by force of will."

"That's part of it. The other part is emotion. Ghosts _shape_ emotion. Especially strong emotion. When they feel hate, they throw knives. And one of the ghost specialty can do the same thing, with enough practice. What you're looking at is the end effect of Shadow Ball."

"Used by…"

"My mother. Directly. Straight by her own hand. This one here?" She stretched one hand between her shoulder blades, arching her back - _Dragon Lords,_ Clair thought, her thighs tightening despite herself- and pointed to a particularly tight cluster in the middle of her back. "Five years old."

"What had you…" Clair trailed off. There was no good response to that.

"Done? Gotten in her way. It wasn't the in thing to be born under Absol when you come from a long line of people who swear they're to protect the spirits of the dead. Depending on your point of view, my kind either cause those souls to be dead in the first place, or lay them to rest. I don't mean quiet them, like a ghost does; I mean _cause them to cease to exist. _Send them on. Either way, we're no friends of ghosts. And you'd better bet that nobody in Gravekeeper Tower _ever _forgot that. Including the practitioners, who know we can do the same thing to them."

"How did…" Clair cursed her ineloquence, but there were no words for this.

"She do it? How could she?" Karin's voice was still calm, strictly modulated, all inflection controlled.

"No," Clair said. "How did you live. How did you survive that."

"She wasn't trying to kill me. Like I said, Absol would- he is not what you'd call the type of protective force that sort of sits idly by at that kind of thing. She'd have wound up meeting an accident, and since the entire problem was that she had no heir, she was really, _really_ trying to avoid that."

"So only a ghost could inherit the… what is it for you, the family name, the Tower?"

Karin shook her head. "More complex than that. Like I said, Gravekeepers, the idea is that the family protects the spirits of the dead, keeps them calm. We don't kill anybody and we don't rouse anybody after they're dead, either, at least not usually. You don't get to do that without a very particular affinity, and you can't just _become_ a ghost trainer if you weren't born to do it, at least not without… something happening. You leave the Tower of resting souls with nobody to keep them at rest, and things tend to happen."

"So the Tower and the job would pass into a different branch's hands. What's the problem with that?"

"Because my lineage has held the Tower since it was built, and because my mother is too much of a damn fool to figure out that every woman in the Clan giving birth to psi kids, _not_ ghosts, for ten years straight, _ought to be a sign._"

"And one dark type."

"Yes. And me. I tended to get lost in that shuffle. Or conveniently forgotten."

"But you were the one who could bring the whole house of cards down around their ears…"

"Yes."

"Why didn't you do it?"

"You don't just _do_ something like that… every action has a reaction. And Absol's children, we _heal_, we don't take away. At least when given our choice. The strength we draw from the moonlight is purifying, not destroying- yeah, we deal with death, but mostly in making it _not happen._ If I'd called disaster onto the Tower, it would have recoiled. A lot of people would have died that didn't have to. I'd have lived long enough to regret it."

"How did you live through it?"

"Well, that depends on what you mean." Karin stretched her hands behind her head and cracked her back, staring up at the moon. "How did I live through her clocking me a few solid ones with Shadow Ball? That wasn't hard; we don't die easy, and we're built resistant to tricks like that. They hurt like a bitch, but it's one of the perks. Or do you mean how did I live with being ignored for most of my early childhood, shoved up in the top of the Tower with a couple Gastly for company? I have a sister who could teleport from age three, who brought me food from the kitchen when she could pull it off without getting caught, at least once she found out she actually had a sister. When she got better, she could teleport me down, too."

"That's actually not what I meant," Clair said quietly, following Karin's gaze up to the scythe in the sky. "What I meant was, how did your _mind_ live."

Karin was silent. Finally she said, "You sound awfully sure that it did."

"You make a very convincing argument that it has."

"Imagine something. You're… oh, let's say you're five. And for the sake of the argument, your youngest brother has just been born, and you've just heard your mother scream bloody murder- professional assessment, not turn of phrase- just like she did at the births of your other two siblings. That means your sibling is psi, like they were. The Tower is silent for three days, not the peaceful quiet of the resting dead, but the kind that means every spirit inside of it is hiding. And _you can't hide._"

"What did you do?"

Another long pause. "There are ways to manipulate the mind without psi powers," she said. "They work best on your own mind. Ways to… to not feel things. To push them away. Like they're happening to someone else. Some people do that with drugs. Other people use the drugs to wake up after they've done the trick with their minds."

"You are the latter group?"

"I don't need the drugs."

Clair's turn to be silent.

"It doesn't make it not hurt. It just hurts someone else, not you. But it doesn't feel all that far away sometimes, especially if hurts that someone else a lot."

"So your mother hurt you."

"She hurt someone else. Someone who wasn't me. This body got the scars, but it wasn't me she hurt." Karin tucked her knees up to her chest and hugged them close. "She didn't hurt me."

"Whom did she hurt?"

"The other person," Karin said, in a tone that prohibited further enquiry. "But not me. That's what mattered."

"How often did she hurt… this other person?"

"Whenever she could catch her," Karin said. "Which got to be less and less often, over time. I got better at hiding, so no one got hurt. And then I left, of course, when I was thirteen. Me and all the other people."

"Left how?"

"Out the front door," Karin said with a little smile. "Me and all the other people and Mitsu- just a Gastly then. We decided we didn't want to be in the Tower anymore. And that was all right, because the Tower didn't want us, either. It didn't want my sibs, either, but the difference between psis and darks is that yeah, psis will exorcise ghosts, but the ghosts have a really good chance of taking them down first. But ghosts can't take down someone of my type, and that makes us a _lot_ scarier."

"Where did you go?"

"North," Karin answered. "Not through Rock Tunnel. It was… it was very dark. And you can't see the moon from inside the tunnel. We tried it, but we didn't get very far. So we went over the mountains instead."

Clair gave a low whistle- raised in mountains herself, she knew how easy that wasn't for a thirteen-year-old.

"It maybe wasn't very smart," Karin agreed. "But to the north was the fastest way to get out of Gravekeeper lands."

"Out of Kanto."

"Out of Kanto," she confirmed. "I was headed for Ecruteak City if I could manage it. Word had come back that, Dragon lands notwithstanding, they were inclined to be more hospitable to Absol's kin."

"How were you intending to get there?"

"That was the flaw in the plan. I was shooting for Mount Moon- there are priestesses of Absol there who could get me through to Johto. But there'd just been an avalanche. The cave was blocked not too far in. I had to turn back around."

"Like you had in Rock Tunnel."

"Yes. So I did the same thing." She took a deep breath. "And then did it again. The priestesses would have been able to get me ship's passage. Without their help… and the rumor was that Gravekeeper Tower was in an uproar, looking for something. So I bolted. Just… ran. We hit Viridian, didn't look left or right, and climbed the fucking mountains into Johto."

Clair hissed. "Dragon Lords, Karin. And you lived through it."

She nodded. "I was a lucky little snot and no mistake. Lucky it was warm, lucky I'd run out in stout boots, lucky there were just enough trainers on the way that Mitsu and I could win some food money and lucky I knew enough about edible plants to feed the two of us when the food ran out. Lucky to have met Art, too."

"Artemis?" Clair guessed, naming Karin's Umbreon.

"Yes. They're constructs, Eevees are, and you don't find them in the wild… unless they're runaways too. Better to have two Pokemon with me than one. Especially when we stepped foot out of the mountains."

"Why?"

"Because things happen to people in Dragon lands when they come in with Ghosts," Karin said succinctly. "If I was with an Eevee I was just another kid. The problems started when I wasn't smart enough to leave it at _just_ Eevee."

Clair bit her lip, and hard.

"Bad things happen to people who bring Ghosts into Dragon lands," said Karin, very quietly.

"Bad things happened to you?"

Karin shook her head. "No. Bad things happened to someone else. Someone who met two teenaged Dragon boys in the woods and called out two Pokemon to protect her, not just one. Someone who showed up as a Gravekeeper in Dragon lands. Someone who didn't belong. Who wouldn't be listened to. Who wouldn't be missed." Karin hugged her knees tighter.

"And you…"

Karin shook her head to clear it. "I ran like hell," she said. "It was becoming very clear that I needed to be able to show who I was if I wanted any help at all, not just which family I came from. I wasn't much of a trainer, but I was going to have to be. I ripped through Violet City gym and kept on running. Met Cernunnos-" –naming her Houndoom- "-and Belladonna on the way. Bella was wonderful, the whole time," she said of her Vileplume. "She helped us sleep when we couldn't."

"When couldn't you?" Clair said, very carefully, aware she'd stepped into something much, much bigger than she'd prepared for. She ignored the voice in the back of her head shrilling, _And you had no idea! _

"When bad things happen, the people they happened to remember them in sleep," Karin said. "They don't want to, but the bad things come back anyway."

_Do you still remember them? What kind of bad things? Karin, what happened to you? _Clair set her jaw against the questions begging to burst out. "So you had a team then."

"Yes. A team. And my team and I were going through gyms and we just kept going. Absol's kin aren't fighters, not usually. But sometimes they have to be. I figured that if I were going to serve Absol as a healer I needed to be in a place where I wouldn't be hurt myself, and where no other people would be hurt either. And that meant I needed power, because people don't hurt strong people."

"You didn't stop in Ecruteak like you'd planned."

"No. Towers or no, there was a strong Dragon presence in Ecruteak at that point. I know that not all Dragons are like the two I'd met- obviously, given my most extraordinary present company-" Karin flashed a smile, and Clair felt herself relax minutely, since this was a grin she recognized. "But there were other people with me, not just me, and they didn't think that they would be safe around Dragons. So we kept going, kept training, kept getting stronger."

Clair had a horrible thought. "Karin," she said. "Karin, what did you do when you hit Blackthorn City?"

Karin was quiet for a moment. "I think you won't like this," she said. "But you may be able to accept it. People who do bad things get punished." She dug into her pocket, where she kept her keys hooked onto the long chain where she kept her badges. "I earned this Rising Badge from someone who had only very recently taken over the gym. He'd taken the position after touring the country with a friend who happened to also be in the gym that night. He didn't stay in the gym very long."

"Did you…"

"I'm not a killer, Clair. Absol's kin do not kill. But some other people do."

Clair thought of her second cousin, the one who had held the gym before her. She and Seig had never known each other well. He'd always been a jerk full of the typical Dragon blather about duty and honor, the kind who didn't believe that any of it actually applied to him, but she'd still cried at his funeral after he'd been found dead on the gym floor with his friend Arc. Autopsy on both had diagnosed aortic rupture.

"What did you do then?" Clair said, to stop thinking about them.

"Well, we couldn't stay in Dragon lands after that person had done that. Back to Kanto, this time over the falls instead of the mountains. I stopped off in Indigo Plateau for supplies and found out something interesting. They were due for a change of Elite. Three members were stepping down, and the Champion with them. The remaining Elite was stepping up to Champion, for however long that would last. A selection trials was to be held in three days. I figured what the hell and signed up."

"And here you are."

"More or less," Karin said. "My mother was one of the Elite stepping down- citing reasons of needing to retire to matters closer to home, and everyone knew at that point that one of her sons had nearly died not long ago, so they figured that was why. In order to advance into the new Elite, one had to first beat most of challengers, then beat the resident Elites. She was the last one I faced."

"How did the battle go, Karin?" Clair asked when she fell silent, trying to suppress a shiver. It was cold out here on the roof in the moonlight.

Karin's sudden smile was bright enough, but there was no warmth to that either. "A ghost does not stand tall against one of Absol's kin. I wiped the floor with her."

"You let her live."

"As I said, I'm not a killer."

"Sometimes other people kill," Clair said.

"More often, when they are in this body, they don't."

Clair swallowed hard, but she had to know. "Whom am I speaking to?"

"To me, of course."

"Who are you?"

"Ah," Karin said. "Yes. I hadn't gotten to that part of the story. Will had also made it through the trials. Morty tried- but after what had happened to him, he wasn't as strong as he was born, and your cousin Lance wiped the floor with him and beat him out for the final Elite position. In either case- Will and I got to catch up. We…" She swallowed hard, paused, then continued in a determined fashion. "We hadn't seen each other since I left the Tower. It had been a few years at this point. I hadn't known what had happened to him. He's very resilient, Will is. Don't let him tell you that Morty saved his mind. It was going down with the ship- Will blasted his mind, his soul, and his power into midair while he was sinking with the full intentions of having Morty just catch his power as Will died. As it happened, as you know, Will didn't die, and all of that went straight back into him. He saved his own self. And he saved Karin."

"How so?"

"I told Will about some of the bad things. He knew about some of them. We'd grown up together, after all. We had a very similar conversation to the one you and I are having now. I told him about the other people."

"And?"

"And he made them go away," Karin said simply, staring up at the moon. "We talked about- about who the other people were, and about how they knew me and how I knew them. And about how they might be other people, but they were still in my body, which meant I was still responsible for them. It's not my kind of power, what a psi can do to someone's mind. I can- I can see spots where the mind is dead, and I can take that death away. But he can see where the energy is twisted, and he can untwist it, he can make it work again. So we agreed that he could make them go away."

"So they're all gone?"

"No," Karin said quietly. "No, they're still with me. But we agreed that we could all... that I would be the voice for all of us. We agreed to that. Mostly."

Words flashed through Clair's mind as she thought again of her second cousin dead on the floor of the gym. _Not guilty by reason of insanity._

"I'm just as sane as you are," Karin said, as though she'd read her mind. "Now I am, anyway. I… even after Will helped me with the other people, I did some things to prove to myself that I am Karin, and that no one else is. To prove that I'm the only one in charge of this body and I can make my own choices, I can do things for myself, because I want to."

The five boxes of condoms that Clair had found in Karin's bathroom closet when she'd ventured in looking for a tampon immediately made more sense.

"But I… there are things that you have to do when you realize you want to have a relationship with another human being, on an equal plane, where you're both sane people," she said with difficulty. "And when the other person is someone you admire enough to want, but to know you can never have, if you keep on like you are. And one of those things is to recognize when you're doing stupid shit and stop doing it."

Clair swallowed hard. "Is that as much of an apology as I'm going to get for that time this summer when I found you in the pool with my cousin Alira?"

"It's that, and it's as much of a declaration as you're going to get," Karin said, very determinedly not meeting her eyes. "I was pretending your cousin was you."

Clair couldn't speak for a moment. Fortunately, Karin saved her the trouble.

"Which is a brilliant example of stupid shit that doesn't help anyone. Except your cousin. And not even her, since as soon as you walked in and I saw you looking like you'd been stricken by something terrible, I shoved off and left, and neither one of us had done anything but a little creative stripping. Let's say it was a wake-up call."

Clair rested a hand on Karin's knee, looking up at the moon. "I can't figure how you'd want to be in the same room as me after what happened to you," she said quietly. "After what Dragons did."

"It was a long time ago," Karin said in the same tone. "And whatever Will did, it happened to someone else. And you're not them." She unlaced one hand from around her legs and placed it lightly atop Clair's.

"I'm not," Clair agreed. "I don't make practice of hurting people." She wrapped her other arm around Karin's shoulders and let the younger woman lean in. Still without her shirt, Karin was shivering. Slowly her body calmed.

"That scythe moon…" Karin said after awhile.

"Hmm?"

"I don't think it's shining on us."

Clair smiled. "No," she said. "I don't think it is."


	3. Scarlet Letter

_Disclaimer: _When I offered to buy the series, the creators looked at what I'd done with their characters, and ran away screaming.

_Rating:_ "Haunting" is rated T for language. And this chapter. Sabrina scares the hell out of me.

**Haunting**

Renn Ireigh

Chapter Three: Scarlet Letter

_Fifteen Years Ago: Gravekeeper Tower_

Sabrina could hardly wait to have a team of her own- a group she'd train _herself_, rather than relying on the products of others' systems. She supposed that would have to wait until after she'd proven herself to the organization, but all the same, that would be easier to do if she could have a competent group of individuals working with her.

All the same, Koga's team, having been skilled in the rudiments of ninjitsu and their leader's work ethic, were admittedly more than adequate for her purposes.

She left them swarming the walls of Gravekeeper Tower, clambering silently up the stones on the dark wall facing the mountains, satisfied in their abilities to invade a building without drawing attention. She herself could walk straight through the front door.

She strode in as though she'd done so every day- never mind that she hadn't so much as set foot in Lavender Town in seven months- and nodded to the two guards. They had the decency to conceal their surprise. No one knew why she'd left, but they guessed it was related to what had happened to the boys, and none in the family had thought she'd be coming back- after all, Karin hadn't. All the more reason to twitch the fingers on her left hand and erase their memory of seeing her.

The first floor looked like it always did, a muddle of the living weeping for the dead. She slipped through the knot and took the stairs, forcing her legs calm. No need for undue speed. She had no need to race, no matter that it felt that every ghost in the Tower was slowly turning to stare at her without blinking.

She was Sabrina, second daughter of Agatha of Aetherios House of Gravekeeper Clan, and the heir to powers never before seen in Gravekeeper. This was her family's home. She'd grown up here. She had no need to hurry. People moved out of her way, and had since she was three years old and teleported herself to hover over the top of the Tower simply because moving herself about the nursery was boring. Even the civilians milling about like ants felt the aura of her power and stood away. Gravekeeper Tower was her turf- no one could have mistaken her for anything but a daughter of the Clan.

She wove through the gravestones on the second floor and climbed the stairs to the third. Koga's squad of Rocket fleet members should be no more than a floor above her at this point. They'd reach the top of the tower before she did, but they'd wait for her orders. Though she wasn't their regular squad commander, and indeed most of them had never seen her before the night, she had impressed them with her force of personality- and a small demonstration of how she felt about failure, courtesy of the merest whisper of her power and a lemonade can whose snap-top was broken and which refused to open.

Third and fourth floor passed underneath her feet, and the everpresent Tower mist coalesced around her ankles. To a ghost, it would be saying "Welcome home." To her, Clan or not, it said "Who goes there?" and thickened to try to hold her in place. _Ghosts guard spirits, darks remove them from the mortal plane, and psychics… make them profoundly uncomfortable,_ Sabrina thought.

Her psi powers were far more a threat to the living than the dead- one could not manipulate the thoughts of a being that did not think, nor tamper with the physiology of a creature with no body. All the same, psi was just another form of energy, and could be used to disrupt the spirit world. _Especially_ when it was present in quantities like those Sabrina commanded. _Especially_ when it was held in check by very thin barriers made of anger and not much else.

_Especially_ when she'd spent the better part of her childhood with those spirits doing their damndest to do what they did best, where psychics were concerned- which was to kill them and turn them into ghosts themselves.

She didn't bother to kick the mist out of her way, even when it tried to solidify and hold her by the ankles. All she had to do was let that anger bleed out of her skin, slipping through her boots, and the spirits fled to the shadows, howling soundlessly. _You would have thought they'd remembered that_, she thought. Ghosts thought they had superiority over psi powers- and generally, they were right. But Sabrina never had been a typical practitioner. The typical sort would not have lived through childhood in the Tower. Right now, she was atypical and angry.

Her boots crunched over bones on the fifth floor and she felt, rather than saw, a Gastly fleeing into the corner of the Tower with another piece of the skeleton. She spared a moment of pity. Ghosts tended to believe that consuming their former bodies would restore them to their place on the mortal plane. It wasn't true, although it made them far easier to reanimate if you listened to Agatha, but that didn't stop them from trying. This Gastly would never manage to find out, not with his old body crushed into dust on the stone floor.

Sixth floor. She was getting closer. A small staircase off the back of this room would lead up to the family's quarters, bypassing the seventh floor entirely; floors eight through thirteen were domestic. Her own room had been on floor twelve, a tiny bunk with a window, her precious few books stored under the mattress. (Agatha had hardly liked her second daughter studying psychic theory; it was yet another reminder of Sabrina's utter failure as a human being, at least as far as the Clan was concerned. But it had been hard to stop a daughter who could get in and out of the Tower as easily as breathing, and not even Agatha had wanted to stand against Sabrina after the time she'd wrecked the entire fifth floor and exorcised all its attendant spirits, and threatened to do the same to the sixth if Agatha took another of her books away.) Well, she'd gotten the books out with her when she left, at least.

Had she not been a daughter of the Clan, the spirits watching her from the fringes of the room would have concerned her. This floor was dangerous. No signs were posted to warn visitors to the Tower what sort of creature found its rest on floor six, but the fact that there were three large spirit chimes hanging from the ceiling should have served for a hint that the ghosts on this floor were the type that needed to be under strict control. Murder victims, all of them, and none too happy about it. Ghosts didn't like to die. That was the fundamental thing that made them ghosts instead of passing on into the atmosphere. Either they were afraid, or angry, or resentful, or guilty- but they tried to rise up and leave and rectify the situation that had gotten them dead. Hence Gravekeeper Clan to keep them at their rest…

Hence the subtle motion of her fingers, and the violet energy haloing her hand. Ghosts didn't like killers. They would generalize that to anyone who intended harm to another living creature. Sabrina was fairly certain that, although she had no intent to kill, the distinction would be lost on the centuries-old and centuries-strong ghosts on the sixth floor.

She thought she might as well back it up, since ghosts didn't like psychics to start with. Sixth-floor spirits wouldn't respond well to the little trick she'd worked on floor five. "I am Sabrina of House Aetherios of Clan Gravekeeper," she whispered- one didn't speak aloud to ghosts. "By the right of my bloodline, I counsel you to peace."

Faced with psi energy in strength and a daughter of the Clan- _that_ daughter, the one who had done for the fifth floor, and had done it recently if you were counting in ghost time- the ghosts subsided, albeit not without a distinct air of watching and waiting. Sabrina shook off the feeling of foreboding, and it wasn't hard; she'd grown up with it.

She paused at the window, ostensibly catching her breath after the climb. The first mate of Koga's squad raised a finger in the darkness, awaiting orders.

_((As we planned)) _she said, broadcasting into the minds of the whole squad. She didn't bother to see if they were wincing again. With luck, they'd figured out that their current commander was going to speak mind-to-mind, and they'd best get used to it. _((I immobilize him; then you come in. Remember that we want him unharmed as we make the deal)) _She paused. _((Physically and mentally. Although it won't hurt him to be scared out of his mind))_

She didn't bother waiting around to see if they'd listened or if there were any questions. She took the last staircase, drew her power like a bow, and struck from the shadow of the threshold.

Fuji froze in the middle of the floor. She hardly had to bear down at all before he swung his head around, eyes wide, teeth almost- were they _chattering? _Sabrina came through the door with a sneer. She hadn't remembered the man being so weak.

She stopped in front of the little man, who stared at her the way a Rattata watched a Pidgeot. "Such a pleasure to see you again, Fuji," she said conversationally, watching his eyes dart from side to side, scoping out an exit route.

"Wh-wh-what are-"

"It's been so long, hasn't it?" she continued. "A good… seven months, is it, since I last walked through the doors of Gravekeeper Tower."

"W-w-we thought you'd-"

"Left. Yes. I have."

"Wh-why-"

"We have business to settle, you and I," she said. "And it happens to coincide with some other business of mine. A work obligation."

"Business?"

"Tell me, Fuji. I haven't been here since the… accident. How are my brothers doing?"

There- that fractional widening of the eyes, the tongue darting out to moisten the corner of dry lips. If she hadn't already known, she knew now.

"Morty and Will… surely you've not forgotten them. It was most upsetting, that… accident… they sustained."

"M-most disturbing," Fuji managed to choke out around the fear. Hard to miss the way he'd gone rigid.

"There's something more upsetting, however," Sabrina continued. "The idea that someone as _devoted_ to Aetherios House as the responsible party would dare to hurt the children of the Clan. Tell me, Fuji… what do you suppose such a person would be feeling as he salted the ice on the lake?"

_This will be the interesting part, _Sabrina thought, though the part of her brain coming up with the words was far detached from the rest of her. _Which lie will he tell? _

"Remorse?" Fuji suggested, his voice as weak as the suggestion. "H- such a person wouldn't wa- want to hurt the people he l-loved so well, would he?"

"You tell me," Sabrina said. "Go on. Conjecture."

"I-I don't have anything else to s-say."

"How about the truth?" she suggested quietly, understandingly, and added a touch of power behind it. Fuji felt it and winced- it felt like a caress, the sort given by seaweed to the face of a newly drowned man.

"H-how would I know?"

"Fuji," Sabrina sighed, and added a touch more power. "You are hardly in a position to be playing innocent. Will doesn't speak any more, you know. A part of him died at the bottom of that lake. And that means…"

Fuji was part Gravekeeper himself, at least on his father's side- his mother had been a nurse, but the family tie was enough for him to have been employed in the Tower after he attained majority. Simple valet and secretarial work had been numbing for his sharp mind and it had been a relief when Agatha's children had been born, as he'd been promoted to tutor- as well as Agatha's right hand man and occasional lover. He knew enough about ghosts to feel the clench of despair in his gut.

Sabrina smiled, but she was hardly amused. "I see you are familiar with it. Yes, a part of him died at the bottom of the lake. Which means that that part of him _marks_ you, Fuji, since it hasn't been laid to rest. Oh, it marks my mother too- I know who gave you your orders. But you had a _choice_, Fuji. You didn't _have_ to go out to the lake that day."

"I-"

"Spare me," Sabrina suggested. "I know my mother makes a very strong case for her minions obeying her at all costs, but really, I am _not interested_ in any excuse you might come up with."

Fuji's jaw snapped shut as though she'd punched him. She hadn't. She wanted to. Oh, how she wanted to. Her fist _itched_ with the desire, her power like fire in her veins, coming out her pores. She thought: _You tried to kill my brother._ She thought: _Control yourself._ She stilled her hand and watched Fuji as he thought it over.

"You're going to kill me, aren't you," he said. Whispered, rather.

Her fist itched. She ignored it. "No. Not today."

He whimpered, and whether he meant to say "Thank you" or strangle out "Today?" she couldn't tell.

"No, Fuji," she said, again with the voice that she'd learned from her mother, the voice that prompted the Tower ghosts to press against the seventh floor door, convinced they'd be welcoming a new member to their ranks. "Not today. However. There is… just one little thing."

"One…"

_((Now)) _she told Koga's squad, and in they came through the window, fanning out around and behind her, black-suited and black-masked. Fuji looked as though he were ready to faint.

"Yes, Fuji. Just one little thing you have that we need…"

.

The squad vanished back out the window the way they'd come- they'd meet her back at base. She wasn't worried. As for herself, she put the thing in her pocket with her tingling hands and walked to the door, ignoring the man in the middle of the room and the faint mewling noises he was making.

"I couldn't help it!" he cried as she touched the door, and she turned around. "She made me! You don't understand!"

Her hand shot forward before she could stop it, her mind blazing like fire, purple energy shooting from her palm and coalescing in the middle of the room. _"You couldn't help it?_" she hissed. "_You tried to kill my brother._"

Fuji's mouth opened, but the scream wouldn't pass the violet sphere of the power that encircled him. Her hand stayed steady. "You nearly killed Will. You crippled Morty. _You couldn't help it?_"

The man dropped to his knees, still screaming. She flicked her wrist and he fell into the center of a letter R smoldering in the stone of the floor. The violet light went out.

Sabrina looked at the body on the floor; her power sensed the faint heartbeat. She looked at her hand. Her veins were quiet now, and so was her mind. Quickly she wrenched away his memory of the last ten minutes, all his recollection of having seen her, and twisted her fingers around her mental representation of the spirit chimes on the floor below.

She opened the door to the sixth floor staircase, where the spirits of murder victims awaited, and let the ghosts in.

.

She teleported to base and knocked on the Boss's door with her right hand; her left hand, the dominant one, felt numb.

"Enter," he commanded, and she obeyed.

"Sabrina," he greeted her, laying his pen down. "Sooner than I expected."

"I have some history with Fuji, as I said. It was a simple matter."

"You have it."

She handed him the Poke Flute- and one of the spirit chimes from the sixth floor.

He raised an eyebrow. "I see you came back with extras."

"Yes. The Flute, as you know, rouses any Pokemon from sleep- and the melody we discussed will wake the dead. The chime, however, will put the ghosts back to sleep. They're not made outside of Gravekeeper Tower and they are not, underscore, bought or sold. I thought it might be useful."

Giovanni smirked. "I send you off on a completely useless mission, and you manage to make it a success."

"Sir?"

"Surely you didn't imagine that the flute was at all useful to me," he said, setting it aside. "Although the calling card you left- you did?"

She nodded. "The letter R burned into the floor."

"There's an element of style to that."

"Thank you, sir."

"Yes, that, added to the fact that there is no trace of your visit- I assume?"

"None."

"I presumed as much. That will inspire fear- that the organization can infiltrate even the Clans. The flute, on the other hand? I'm assuming your Clan has an excellent reason for making sure the dead stay dead. No, that was included as an exercise for you. Call it a training drill.

"But these chimes…" he trailed off, then smiled. "Should your Clan retaliate, these will be most useful."

"Thank you, sir."

He looked at her with those dark eyes. She folded her hands behind her back, right hand clasping left wrist. "I suspected, when I hired you, that you would turn out to be most valuable to this organization. I can see that I was right. Was there damage done to the squad you led?"

"None, sir."

"Any incidents to report?"

"None, sir. We entered the building, had a… conversation… with Fuji, and left. No questions asked. The man himself will have nothing to say if pressed for information. He will not remember a thing."

"He is alive?"

"I felt his heartbeat as I left the room. I will not promise he will be alive tomorrow."

"No?"

"In that Tower, it is dangerous to be scared near to death."

She felt the intensity of his stare, but said nothing.

"If he dies, is there anything that will let it be traced back to you?"

"No. And rightly. I did not lay a hand on him. Things happen in the Tower as a matter of course that most prefer to call 'accidents.' In many cases they are. As I said, I've a history with Fuji. The reason for that is that there are things that he has done that have left others in the Tower- namely the ghosts- feeling they've a score to settle. In his line of work, that is a serious occupational hazard."

"And his death, will that be traced back to the organization?"

"Not in Gravekeeper Tower. It will be traced back to the hands that killed him, which is to say, the ghosts. It is the sort of thing that can happen at any time inside the Tower. And he may well live out the night, however. He is half Gravekeeper himself. It is possible that he will defend himself." She shrugged. "I decided not to risk Koga's squad further by staying around in a spirit uprising once I felt it starting. I did not know enough about the squad to know if they were prepared to deal with it."

The Boss was silent for a moment. Sabrina tightened her hand on her wrist. She wondered if the first mate of the squad had reported by radio before she'd gotten in, if he'd seen that flash of violet light as he descended the Tower. She wasn't fool enough to think she'd been sent out in sole command, with none of the squad's members under orders to report all details.

"It is most irregular, as you've not been here a month yet, but if I were a man who ignored all common sense in the name of regularity, I'd hardly have developed this team into what it is," the Boss said.

"I'm sorry, sir?" Her left hand tingled and she dug her nails into it.

"Sabrina, every mission you have been part of, whether it was a solo or team effort, has succeeded brilliantly. I would be a fool not to acknowledge that. I would like to offer you the position as Elite within the Team."

.

At breakfast on Wednesday, two days later, Sabrina opened her mail to find a small gray envelope with the faint scent of lavender. It contained a brief obituary of one Fuji Tsuhino, half-Clan, who had joined the Tower's ghosts on Tuesday morning. No details were given of his death, which meant, to any Gravekeeper, that he'd met the fate of so many members of the Clan- the ghosts had gotten him. It was the end that awaited the careless, and there was little honor to it. That notwithstanding, and half-blood or not, there would be a welcoming ceremony for his spirit held on Friday. He would be interred on the sixth floor.

Sabrina looked down at her left hand, which felt quiescent, and searched her mind for any traces of that burning feeling. She closed her eyes and turned them inward, examining herself for that anger.

_Never again,_ she told it when she found its cinders smoldering. _I have dominion here._ She proved it with the wall she built to corner it and keep it away.

She finished her breakfast and left the mess, seeking her new quarters and the small office attached to them- the one she intended to make her practice room. She'd find an instructor in Saffron, shameful as it was to contemplate, but that was a matter for later in the day.

She sat in lotus, dropped her mind into meditation, and held her left hand securely in her right as she began the mantra she'd read about in one of the books she'd salvaged from the Tower so many years ago. _Power is nothing without direction. The mighty blizzard is nothing more than a collection of snowflakes under strict control. Without control, one accomplishes nothing…_


	4. Close Encounter

_Disclaimer: _Pokemon is the property of Tajiri Satoshi and Sugimori Ken.

_Notes: _I'm taking a wee liberty with geography for the sake of artistic license and not having to seriously consider the motion of the tides. I'm also going to mention that writing these two at this age is so much more fun than writing them just two years later.

_Rating:_ "Haunting" is rated T for language. And this chapter too.

**Haunting**

Renn Ireigh

Chapter Four: Close Encounter

_Present Day: Indigo Plateau_

"You think we ought to go up there anyway?" Morty asked, looking at the locked door of Karin's bedroom.

_((_Clair _is up there)) _Will said again. _((I think we are superfluous))_

Morty snorted. "I am never superfluous."

_((Certainly you never think you are)) _Will agreed, slipping an arm around his brother's shoulder. _((Come on. Leave them to it))_

"Don't know what kind of 'it' they can get up to on the side of a roof," Morty said. Will cuffed him on the ear. "Oy!"

_((Behave))_

"That's never any fun at all," he grumbled, then changed the subject as they headed back down the hall. "I wonder if Sabrina will come this year. The party, I mean. She didn't come last."

_((It's been awhile))_

"Rumor going around is she was in Silph when the building… fell down. I went into Saffron looking for her, but she wasn't there." He fell silent.

_((She's still alive))_

"I know _that_," Morty said, irritated. "I'd be a hell of a ghost specialist if I couldn't tell if my own sister were dead."

_((She's safe, wherever she is)) _Will said.

"I could find her."

_((I don't doubt that, but I am not sure you'd like what you found)) _said Will. _((I think we need to decide what we are going to do if Mother _does_ show up again this year))_

"As we know she will."

_((Seeing as she's entirely liable to stage an encore of last year's performance))_

Morty grimaced. "That was ridiculous."

_((That was insulting))_

"That was _vile_. Honestly. Insisting I get back to the Tower and breed with every female ghost around the place in the hopes that _one of them_ would spawn a ghost kid?"

_((I was offended at the suggestion))_

"She's never understood about us, and I'm not sure I want her to. And I sure as hell wasn't going to try to explain it to her in the middle of the damn hall."

_((If she was ever sane, she isn't anymore))_

"That's the truth." He unlocked the door to their room- well, it was technically Will's, but he spent enough time up here to consider it his as well- and turned on the lights. "You think she ever was?"

_((The things she did take too much planning to be the work of someone insane)) _

"That your professional opinion?"

Will considered. _((More or less))_

"Thank you, that clarifies things immeasurably."

Will sighed. His brother had never been precisely the poster child for cheerfulness, but heroin withdrawal was making him flat out grouchy- although that was improving as his limbs came back under his own control. _((I'm not going to try to touch that woman's mind to give you my professional opinion on its state, and that's that))_

"Well, whatever it is, she's out of her mind right now and that's a fact."

_((No disagreements))_

Morty threw himself down onto the bed, long gangly bones sprawled akimbo and blonde hair everywhere, and pulled Will down next to him. "This is our turf and she doesn't belong here."

Will occupied himself with trying to find a comfortable place not already occupied by one of Morty's limbs, which poked one, then gave up and set his mask on the night table. The scars on the left side of his face had faded, but not enough that he was about to go out in public without covering them.

Morty continued in the same vein. "I say we throw her into the pool in Undertow. Nice little parallel."

_((I never know whether you keep joking about that because it hurts or because it doesn't))_

"I wasn't really joking."

_((I mean bringing it up))_

"Does it bother you?"

_((A little)) _Will said, considering it. _((It's not a memory I _like_ having brought up, although I've become rather inured to it, thanks to someone I know))_

"I'd bow, except I don't want to get up," Morty said, wedging an arm under Will's neck so he could pull his brother closer. "You think we'd have ended up doing this if not for that?"

_((Your specificity is always astounding))_

"You know what I mean. This." He levered himself up so he could kiss Will, slow and languid, taking his time. Will smiled.

_((I think we might have figured it out))_

"Maybe you would have. I wouldn't. I was dumber than that Psyduck that lived in the lake as a kid."

_((You think I'd have brought it up?))_

"You did," Morty pointed out.

He quirked a grin. _((I did, didn't I?))_

"One good thing that happened that entire day."

_((You think it was worth the trade off?))_

Morty lay back against the pillows again and contemplated, then shifted to bury his nose in Will's hair, which he always swore helped him contemplate, although Will tended to think it just distracted him. Certainly that seemed the case- minutes rolled by, and Morty didn't respond.

Will rolled onto his side and rested his forehead against his brother's, letting the thoughts roll into his mind, and finding them to be memories.

Will closed his eyes and followed Morty down.

_Sixteen Years Ago: Gravekeeper Tower_

By mutually unspoken agreement they'd decided to split and meet up again at the lake, since they'd long since figured out that Agatha was less likely to come after them if she didn't think they were together plotting ways of raising hell. In a Gravekeeper household, that was less a figure of speech than a slight exaggeration. Will had managed it, once, even though he was psi and summoning and manifestations were technically supposed to be out of his purvey. It had been an excellent distraction maneuver. Cook was too busy defending the kitchen from the poltergeist in the pantry to notice Morty nipping out of the kitchen with an entire tray of cookies. Will had been nine, Morty ten, and the stomachaches were mighty- but worth it.

It was that sort of mischief that led Agatha to curse the two of them more than once. Not the sort of curse she'd have laid upon a spirit bent on rising from the grave, but dire threats all the same, the kind that would get them when they died. For instance, after a particularly impish bit of psi-work stemming from a good deal of incantation which had coaxed some of the fourth-floor ghosts to take up the entirety of Agatha's wardrobe and streak about the Tower, manifesting voices to screech "I feel pretty, oh so pretty!"- well, she'd pointed her finger at Will (who, very sensibly, was running out of the Tower as though all of hell were on his heels) and screeched, "A day will come when you will no longer be able to force incantations past those grinning lips of yours!"

Then, too, the brothers had rendezvoused at the lake, in a boat in the middle since the water also had the added benefit of blocking ghost powers. After they'd got done congratulating themselves, they'd admitted to each other that maybe the night of one of the Clan meetings, with every family member in attendance, might not have been the right time to provoke their mother.

She'd gotten over the brief phase she'd gone through of beating them; it was so long ago that it seemed a distant nightmare at this point, irreconcilable with the mother who was never _nice,_ but who told them they were satisfactory sons and who told them their work was acceptable when they accomplished innovative things. Beating them hadn't worked for very long, anyway, as Morty was uncommonly good at shields, and Will uncommonly good at teleporting. Besides which, at that point Sabrina was going through her phase of blowing things up, and Agatha had wisely decided that provoking any of them was perhaps not a wise choice if she wanted to have children to inherit the Tower- not to mention a Tower for them to inherit. Still, even though she seemed to have gotten over the idea that she'd given birth to three psychics and a daughter of Absol, and no ghosts whatsoever, it was generally unwise to prod her into anything past a fit of pique. She held the Tower, after all, and the Tower had the ghosts. And the ghosts _hadn't_ gotten over the fact that they lived in forced harmony with three psis.

By the time Morty got to the bank of the lake, Will had flattened himself out on his back on the ice midway to the center of the and had, to all appearances, gone to sleep. Morty nudged him with the toe of a boot and Will kicked at him lazily. "Bugger off."

"You first," Morty said, lying down next to his brother. He could feel the energy-work Will had laid on the ice- a thin shield, cold on the bottom and warm on the top, so that he could lie down without freezing but not melt the ice below. "Where're you drawing the heat?"

"Kitchen fire. Not so bad. Dinner will take an extra three minutes to warm up, but hey."

Morty snorted and laid a hand on the ice. Will yelped and threw himself sideways as the shield abruptly heated several hundred degrees.

"Whoops," Morty said calmly, making a sweeping gesture with his hand. The shield cooled down and spread under Morty's body. "There. Nice and warm. Sorry I scorched your backside. Go sit in a snow pile."

Will made a rude gesture at his brother and gingerly lay back down. "Where'd that come from?"

"The sun."

"Impressive," Will said, and meant it. "You melt the ice we're lying on with that stunt?"

"Nah," said Morty, closing his eyes. "Stole some cold off the next star over."

"You lie like a throw rug. Going to take you out and beat you like one."

"You hit like a girl."

"You hit like a four-year-old."

"You hit like a two-year-old. Girl."

"Right, that was inventive," Will snorted. "Seriously, if we go through the ice on this thing, it's fifty feet to the bottom."

"Twenty-five, and we're not going through."

"Good job I trust you."

"When have I ever lied to you?"

Will held up a hand and ticked occasions off on his fingers. "The time when you told me you'd get that poltergeist _out_ of my room, the time when you said you heard Mother talking about marrying me off to one of those shrine keepers over in Johto, the time when-"

"Did you actually believe me with that thing about the shrine girl?"

"I was_ twelve._"

"Pft," Morty said. "Dumb as a box of rocks."

"Scared the hell out of me, you jerk."

"Never had any hell in you. Not my fault you're scared of girls."

"I'm not _scared._ Not any more than _you_ are."

"Well, I'm not."

"Yeah? Remember when we went up to Cerulean and that red-haired girl tried to kiss you? You were so poleaxed you fell in the pool."

Morty turned beet red. "I'm not _scared,_" he said defensively, and then figured _What the hell_. "I just… don't like girls. Not like that."

"I know _that_," Will said, as though he'd just heard "The sky is blue" presented as a great revelation. "It's just _you_ didn't know it, not then. At least I don't think so."

"You didn't know that," Morty said, caught between outrage and resign. "You're making that up."

Will tapped a finger to his temple. "No I'm not. It's okay. I don't either."

"You don't?" This was new information, and Morty looked at his brother in outright shock and more than a little re-evaluation. For his part, Will was lying back on the ice, eyes closed, as though he hadn't said a thing.

"Nah. Looks like it's up to the girls then. I mean, the whole family name thing. You know anybody? That you like, I mean? Guys."

_Yes,_ he thought, but that was a terrible kind of thought even now, and he wasn't going to voice it. Instead Morty levered himself up to a sitting position so he could glare at Will. "We don't exactly get to meet a lot of those, if you haven't noticed. How do you- how do you just _know_ stuff like that? How do you not have to- to-"

"Spend two years soul-searching?" Will suggested.

"Yeah. No! I mean how'd you know that about _me_?"

Will shrugged. "Sometimes I just know things. It's… it's the same way I _know_ that I can pull heat from the fire, for instance. Or the same way I _know_ when Mother's going to try to have it out with Sabrina so we can get out of the way before the ghosts go crazy."

"Are you prescient?"

"I think so. Maybe a little. I can't tell the future- well, not exactly, anyway, I can get _feelings _- but there's stuff I know."

"Hey," Morty said, genuinely impressed. "That's- that's almost as good at reading minds. Even _I _can't do that."

"So of course it astounds you that someone else can do something you can't, Mr. 'I-Pulled-The-Cold-From-The-Nearest-Star.'" Will made a face.

"Well, it's hard to _find_ things I can't do," he boasted, except that it wasn't really bragging because it was more or less true. He _had_ pulled the cold on the underside of the shield from space. He hadn't known for sure that he'd be able, but he figured he probably could, and for a psychic in the middle of puberty and thus the full flush of his power, one who hadn't had any formal training to limit what he thought he could do, that was good enough.

"Well, you can't know your own mind," Will said with finality to take the wind out of his sails. "Your own character is a secret to you."

"Shove off."

"You first," Will said. "Look, you think we should run away?"

"What?" Morty blinked a few times. Will could make Cycling Road turn right-angles.

"Well, Karin did. And Sabrina's not long from walking out herself."

"Who told you?"

"Didn't we just get done talking about how I know things?"

"I guess," Morty conceded. "But look, why us? Seems to me we've got it pretty good here."

"How you figure?"

"Well, Mother's gotten over the fact that we're the only kids she's got, both of us are strong enough to handle the ghosts even if _they_ don't like it, either one of us could inherit the whole thing once she's dead."

"Or she turns the Tower and the job over to one of the other Houses of the Clan."

"She won't do that," Morty said. "That's like giving up. That _is_ giving up."

"I just- something feels wrong," Will said, staring up at the sky until his eyes hurt from the brightness. "Something bad is going to happen. I don't want to be here when it does."

Morty elbowed him. "Ickle brother scared of shadows."

"Shut up, I'm being serious."

Morty wasn't done. "It's okay, ickle, big strong brother protect you."

Will kicked him. "I said I'm being _serious._"

"I think you're being ridiculous," Morty said frankly. "Look, Mother did all sorts of bad juju when we were younger, I know the kind of stuff she tried to summon up, but she hasn't done that in ten years, I really think she's done with it. We could _inherit, _Will."

"Don't be blind," Will snapped. "You think an entire Tower full of ghosts is going to accept being kept quiet by a _psychic_? You don't think _they'd_ try to kill either one of us the second Mother turned her back? You don't remember the last time, when they tried to eat all three of us and we only made it out because-"

"That was a year ago! They don't now!"

"Yeah, because Sabrina exorcised the whole floor of fifths not too long ago, and they don't want that happening twice, so they're not going to tick anyone off while they're under control, but it didn't exactly endear us to them. Remember the sixths grabbing your mind and floating you towards the window? Good job I woke your behind up. You're like a buffet to them, the kind of power you command, they'd have had you jumping out of the window so they could drink it."

"I really think you're jumping at shadows."

Will wasn't done. "You're not sick of living every day having to watch your back? Besides, you know the kind of power flux that happens when the Gravekeeper dies, before the next one takes the job. You don't think that the ghosts wouldn't try to do something with that? Like kill off anyone they could?"

"I think you're underestimating-"

"I think you're _over_estimating how much the ghosts like us."

"Look," Morty said, uncomfortably aware that this line of discussion was probably going to get him punched. "I don't want to be a jerk, here, and I don't know if this prescience thing makes you see all kinds of possible futures or what, but you're not always known for being the most accurate when it comes to- _ghoof!_"

He'd been right. Will punched him.

The thing was, some part of Morty reflected as he howled and curled around his stomach, Will could be a shrinking violet and no mistake. Of the two of them, Morty had the guts and the firepower, and if you wanted sheer balls to the wall strength, you called the older brother and left the younger one at home. But there were times when his younger brother turned into someone that Morty didn't recognize- someone whose dark blue eyes turned black when he was angry, someone who could win a game of chess, blindfolded, against old men who'd played for years, someone who could coax and coerce a floor full of angry spirits into fighting themselves instead of siren-singing Morty out of a window despite that someone being psi- the kind of person who shouldn't be able to do that. Someone who could throw a punch and _mean it_.

Morty lay still, trying not to throw up on the ice. Will tackled him.

"_What the hell_," Morty choked, throwing himself to the side. It didn't work. Will landed on top of him, pinning him to the ice- or trying. Morty twisted in an ab-wrenching maneuver that brought him sitting up, one knee between Will's thighs, and he used the momentum to grab Will's arm and _shove_. Will grabbed him in a headlock and the two went rolling across the ice towards the center of the lake, kicking at each other, scrabbling for purchase in each other's bodies. Morty opened his mouth to bite Will on the ear, got shoved, rolled, and ended up with a mouthful of ice. _This tastes like _salt, he thought to himself with some astonishment, and sat up to tell Will so when the explosion happened.

Will shrieked something profane and threw himself backwards across the ice; Morty did not acquit himself any more gracefully. The windows of the Tower blew outwards. Someone screamed. Mist rolled out from the walls.

Underneath them, the ice groaned.

"I think we'd better get out of here," Morty said, very carefully, feeling that swell inside him that meant that he needed to get ahold of himself before he broke something.

Will struggled to his feet and walked over to Morty to offer him a hand up- and then the ice cracked, all at once, and Will screamed and fell into the lake.

Morty howled and shouted and threw himself down on the ice, yelling his brother's name, sticking his arm down into the water- and then yanking it out just as fast when he felt the chill. _Think!_ he snarled at himself, forcing all panic aside, shoving his mind into quiescence- and then the idea came to him. He made a rope of his energy and dropped it into the icy water- and watched it sizzle out.

_Water blocks ghost power,_ he thought with a panic. _That's why we come here- _but it blocks psi too…

Morty threw his head back and howled, "_WILL!"_

Next to him the ice shattered upwards, a pulsing sphere of sapphire-colored energy- the color of Will's aura. "_Will?_" Morty yelled, but it wasn't Will at all- or it was, but only halfway to the way that mattered.

_((TAKE IT))_

Will's voice came from everywhere and nowhere, loud but dull and blurred, and Morty realized what his brother had done and why the orb had the same feel to it has his brother, and made a decision without thinking. He dived into the lake.

Water or no water, he could still effect psi-changes within himself, and he did- ripping gills into the side of his neck so he could breathe, pulling the sunlight down with him to melt the ice around him in a circle the size of a Snorlax and to warm his own blood too while he was at it, sharpening his eyes to see in the gloom. He'd pay for all of it later but this wasn't the _time_ to worry about that, not with Will floating down by the bottom, his body empty with his power floating in an orb above the surface, a wraith wrapped around him as though-

_Kissing him,_ Morty said, feeling at once taut and hollow. _Which explains everything, really._

Psychics of sufficient power could control ghosts. And those with insufficient power could be controlled by them. It was a fine line, but at the bottom of it was this: those who could be controlled by ghosts could use the powers of ghosts. The theory was simple: let the ghost in, take its power while it was taking yours, throw it out, and keep its abilities for your own.

It took a ghost- like Agatha- to really, _really_ control another ghost, the kind of control that kept one in a grave.

_Screw that,_ Morty thought, and with the power that only a young psychic in the throes of puberty could command, discarded the laws of the universe and blasted the wraith away from his brother. He grabbed Will, kicked off from the bottom, and used the same energy to speed the two of them to the surface.

.

Will wasn't breathing when Morty dragged him out onto the ice, and his face was ripped open and bleeding too close to the eye for comfort, but Morty wasn't the most powerful human psychic for nothing. He started CPR while reaching out with his powers, thinking that if he could only touch Will's mind, he could jump-start his body.

Except that when he reached out, there was nothing there.

"_Come on!" _he yelled, the heels of his hands working on Will's chest, bearing down with his mind.

He touched empty space. And his brother didn't have a heartbeat.

Morty turned to the sapphire orb that was all of Will's power, but stopped at the last minute- he couldn't force it into the husk of a dead body.

It would have taken a ghost to do that.

He didn't think, because he was afraid that if he did he'd change his mind. He dove into the water, past the ice, looking for the wraith.

Over the lake Agatha's voice echoed: _"NO! NOT HIM! THE OTHER ONE, DAMN YOUR EYES, THE OTHER ONE!"_

.

He found the wraith drifting at the bottom in the company of others- _No wonder the windows blew out,_ some part of him thought, _letting all these out-_ and forced himself to draw out the same sheer power that had worked before, roping it around himself, the psychic energy that he probably shouldn't be able to pull off. He realized, a little giddy, that he was pulling it out of his soul.

No ghost could resist bait like that- psi energy was _alive_, breathing and pulsing, delicious to the dead. The wraiths sprung at him, took him in a headlock, kissed him, forced themselves in.

Morty forced himself not to gag at the touch of the dead on his skin, and then had better things to worry about- the gray mist settling over his eyes, the feeling of bleeding out through a nonexistent wound where the wraith was drinking his power. He realized he was tired, and he was cold. Very cold. He thought if he went to sleep he'd warm up.

He realized if he went to sleep Will would never wake up.

The ghosts were inside him now, lapping at his power, the life energy they hadn't tasted in hundreds of years. Morty realized what he hadn't thought about when he dove into the water: that no matter what, even if he came out of this alive, he wasn't coming out of it whole. _I just need to be whole enough,_ some part of him said, and he held himself in perfect stillness for a moment, let the ghosts take one more bite out of his mind, and then wrenched his power away and blasted them, throwing the wraiths out of his body and soul.

Without them he felt empty. He felt his heartbeat slow- had it ever been this loud before? Had he ever been this aware of it?- and then shudder back into rhythm. He choked on the water as he started to breathe again.

_Will_, Morty thought, and tried to teleport himself to the surface, only to feel a white-hot pain across the inside of his mind like it had been stabbed. Suddenly he realized what he'd just done.

_Will_, he thought again, shoving away the despair, and kicked his way to the edge of the ice where his brother lay.

.

It was easy for one ghost to reanimate a dead body. That was the problem in the first place, and the whole reason Gravekeeper Tower existed, along with the Clan to guard the spirits of the not-so-restful dead. It didn't take any kind of training. It didn't take much power, either, which Morty thought in an abstracted sort of way was an outstandingly good thing, because he was drained of all his energy like he'd never been before.

He took the sapphire orb, opened his brother's lips, and gently fed Will's body his soul.

Then he waited.

It didn't take long for Will to wake up, and he did so as though from sleep, sitting up and rubbing at his eyes- then opening his mouth to yowl when his fingers touched the open space where his skin used to be across the top of his cheek bone. He opened his mouth, but no sound came out.

Morty watched his brother clutch his throat and felt like doing the same thing. _I did it wrong_, he thought. _I screwed up and I killed his brain, I stuck his soul in but his brain had been dead too long—_

_((That was _stupid_, Morty))_

Morty looked around for the voice before he realized it was Will's and it was in his mind. Apparently his brother had scrabbled for mental purchase and found it in the time that Morty was still spinning his wheels.

_((You could have died. We both could have died))_

Will drew his knees to his chest and flexed his fingers, letting sapphire light play around them.

"Well, neither one of us did," Morty pointed out.

_((You-)) _Will choked off his next word. _((You turned yourself))_

Morty couldn't say "Yes."

_((You didn't let the wraith turn me. You threw him off and turned yourself))_

He nodded, because he couldn't speak.

_((You idiot!)) _Will yelled, and threw himself at Morty, but he didn't punch him, he grabbed his brother by the back of the neck and kissed him square on the mouth. It tasted a little like blood and a little like salt and their teeth knocked together. _((You saved my life, Morty, you saved my life))_

They broke apart, both shivering, and not just because they were on ice. "Yeah," Morty whispered, scrabbling for something to say. "Yeah. You- you weren't going to let the wraith turn you. You chucked your soul up here. Didn't you."

_((I meant for you to take the power for yourself)) _Will muttered, rubbing the back of his head. _((Look, do you have a mirror?))_

"What?"

_((I'm losing a lot of blood))_

"Uh… no. I don't carry a mirror."

Will sighed, closed his eyes (wincing,) and concentrated. Of the powers that dealt with the spiritual world, psychic energy was the only kind that worked with _life_- with creation, not destruction. The wounds were new enough that he could heal these, instead of needing a dark-type to burn the death away first. Slowly the gashes met, explored each others' edges, met, new scar tissue wedding them. Morty watched in gruesome fascination.

_((I think I had just enough- I was too decent with ghosts)) _Will said when he was nearly done. Morty couldn't stop staring at the blood._ ((I could make them do things. She was going for me. It should have been me))_

"Yeah, well, you were trying to die instead, so some of us with half a brain thought it shouldn't be you. Some of us with more power to throw those wraiths out." He ripped his eyes off of Will's face, then steeled himself and looked inside, where he normally felt full of fire. He felt half-empty, but there was a wall up between his reaching fingers and his reservoirs, a wall he couldn't break down. "Shit."

Will wouldn't look at him. _((You can't use it anymore, can you))_

"No. I- I don't think so. I think it's-"

_((Say something. Say something to me))_

"I've been talking."

_((I mean like this. Mind-to-mind. It's… it's innate, it's not a deliberate manifestation of power, you don't have to draw on anything to use it))_

Morty focused. He'd never been good at this- this was Will's purvey. Morty slammed things and blew them up. Will snuck around walls and insinuated into rooms. _((I…))_

He felt an intense rush of joy and realized it wasn't his, it was Will's. _((You can still reach my mind. You still have a bit of psi you can use. You're not totally…))_

_((Ghost)) _Morty supplied. _((I'm enough of one. I could…))_

_((Inherit)) _Will finished. _((The Tower. The family name. The prestige. The power)) _He still wouldn't look up, but mind-to-mind, he couldn't hide- the relief, the sense of foreboding, the fear, the hint of panic, and something else, something different. _((Maybe enough to make up for what…))_

_((What I lost. Yeah)) _Abruptly he stood up and dropped his link with Will's mind. There were things he didn't know if he wanted to feel, not yet. Will was the emotional one. Morty was the one who wouldn't know his own mind without two years of soul-searching. He licked his lips, tasting his brother, and that settled it. "Come on."

_((Where?))_

"There was salt on the ice. I tasted it when you decked me. You were right. I think we should leave before our mother gets out here."

_((But you'll be leaving your inheritance)) _

Morty was already walking away. He tossed back a wan grin over his shoulder. "Yeah. I know. Are you coming with me?"

_((Where are we going?))_

"Doesn't matter. You coming?"

Drying their clothes and calling up a bubble of warm air, heat drawn from the cooking fire- a bubble he wrapped around them both, since now Morty couldn't- he followed his brother west, out of the sight of the Tower.


	5. Ghosts Walking

_Disclaimer: _The tribe has spoken, and I own nothing but the hell I give my characters.

_Notes: _I want to thank Meneldur and WiseAbsol for their commentary on the last few pieces; it was in large part thanks to their interest that "Haunting" came together so quickly. I had the bare bones of it done long before "Patchouli," and bits and bats of the rest- in real-world time, Clair and Karin had that conversation two years ago- but chapters one, two, and five are completely new and the majority of four hadn't even gotten its act together in my head before it ended up on the page. I'm fortunate to have readers whose interest in my work is such an inspiration and I appreciate both of their support.

_Timeline and Continuity: _In my fic-verse, this final chapter takes place several days after "Lucky" which places it just a week or so before "Kindling."

**Haunting**

Renn Ireigh

Chapter Five: Ghosts Walking

_Present Day: Indigo Plateau_

When Karin woke the next morning- afternoon, rather- Clair was gone. She snapped bolt upright, panicked, before she saw the note on her nightstand. Shaky, not trusting her hand to pick it up, she leaned over to read it.

_Good morning. I'm sorry that I had to leave while you were still asleep, but I didn't want to wake you and I need to be at the Den by noon. I'll be back tonight. There's a present for you under this note. _

It had no signature, but that hardly mattered.

Karin sagged back into the pillows, smiling, boneless with relief. She didn't pick up the note for a good few minutes.

Under it was a small envelope, bearing the Indigo Plateau seal, addressed to Agatha of the Gravekeeper Clan, and with a note on the flip side in Clair's handwriting: "The rest of these went out today. It won't be missed."

Karin smiled, then grinned, and then started laughing. After awhile the laughter turned to sobs, which carried her back to sleep.

After dark, Clair found Karin still asleep, drew the curtains on the sliver of crescent moon, and slipped into bed next to her, deciding not to wake her.

_Celadon City Game Corner- Subterranean Floor 2_

"However, if you follow the theory that the types were created and established to control each other and check and balance each other as a means of population control and you _also_ accept the rationale behind that theory, you would be forced to also accept her postulation that the three spirit-related powers are unrelated," Sabrina pointed out, clenching her teeth around a yawn and pointing to the relevant sentence in the old book that Giovanni had brought with him. "Which- ah, which we know they are not; in fact they are closely tied together, which-"

"Which is a topic for another day," Giovanni cut in smoothly, closing the book and placing it out of her reach.

She glowered at him. "If I wanted, I could bring that text right back over," she said.

"I trust you won't do that. You're intended to be healing."

"I am healed as much as I need."

"That is a bald-faced lie." Giovanni stretched, long and languid, and cracked his knuckles behind his fingers. "Rest."

"I am thoroughly sick of rest," Sabrina very nearly grumbled, aware she sounded petulant, but not caring- fast though she burned it off, morphine was morphine. "I want to _do_ something."

"You are doing something. You are resting and healing. I will not have you getting out of this hospital bed before you are ready just so that you can fall down in the middle of a mission. Think of how it would demoralize the troops."

"I've had three days."

"Yes, and you also have several spinal fractures, disc trauma, and I'm told two cracked ribs, although I note you have not seen fit to mention that part to me."

"It was hardly relevant."

"It was extremely relevant."

Sabrina stared at the ceiling. "I do not like this at all," she commented, as though on the weather. "This room is a cage, and my body refuses to be much less of one." She shook her head, the only effect of which was to spill her hair about her eyes. "I cannot even braid this mess back without some part of my anatomy attempting to mount armed rebellion."

Giovanni rose to his feet and she closed her eyes, thinking he was about to leave her to her thoughts and the four white walls. "Can you sit up at all?" he asked.

She obeyed the order, although more through her power than through her body's own abilities. She ignored her back screaming as she levered herself up so that her head was clear of the pillows on which it had been resting.

Giovanni sat on the mattress beside her, and before she had more than opened her mouth he'd splayed his fingers in her hair, smoothing it and dividing it into three even sections.

"Sir?" she asked, neck burning with the effort of holding her body still.

He didn't answer. Instead he finger-combed a stray strand of hair back from her face, his finger whispering against her jaw, and slipped it into place as he twisted the sections around each other.

Sabrina didn't breathe, and not just because the edge of one of her ribs was jutting near her lungs. His fingers stroked her scalp, the side of his nail barely scraping the skin; his knuckles brushed against the back of her neck. She felt his breath faintly over her ear.

Giovanni tied off the braid with a piece of ribbon she'd used as a bookmark, curling the end around his fingers for a moment, then stood up abruptly. "Now it's out of your way," he said. "I would like you to rest, no matter how little you like it. I need you whole, Sabrina."

He slipped out the door, leaving her to her thoughts, which were every bit as disconcerting as they were interesting.

_Indigo Plateau_

The brothers lay forehead-to-forehead, eyes closed. A year ago, before the overdose, they'd have been able to drop into each other's thoughts; now it was just Will. Morty hadn't lost the innate core of energy that had made him psychic, hadn't lost the basic things his mind could do when touched by another psi. He'd just lost his ability to affect anything outside of the realm of his own self, while the residual psychic energy warred with the ghost powers and made it nearly impossible for him to master either. The overdose had done for the rest, and would have done for his mind, if it were easier to kill a ghost.

"Flat out second rate," Morty muttered, and it took Will a minute to realize that Will must have voiced his thoughts, or something like them. Or Morty's were simply running along a parallel track, which wasn't in itself unusual.

_((Exceptional in your way))_

"Could have been better." He meant "if it hadn't happened." He meant "without the drugs."

_((Could have been)) _Will agreed. _((But you kept your mind, which is something)) _He paused, then repeated himself. _((In the end, has it been worth it?))_

Morty was silent for another moment, but then opened his eyes to lock onto Will's, pushed himself up, bent his head down, and, into Will's lips, breathed, "_Yes."_


End file.
